A Critical Analysis Of Modality In English Economic News Discourse

As a new branch of modern linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA) assimilating the results of scientific research in Linguistics, Sociology, Psychology and Mass Media, etc., has drawn more and more attention from scholars and researchers. It aims to explore and articulate the dialectical relationship between language and ideologies hidden behind language, through analyzing public discourses.Critical discourse analysis is mainly based on Systemic Functional Grammar. It seeks to unveil the ideology and power relations that are concealed in public discourses by studying the details of the linguistic structures of public discourses in the light of their social and historical contexts. Modality is used to express the speaker's responsibility of the proposition, their attitude toward readers and the power relation between reporters and readers. Through the analysis, it is found that although the language of English economic news is always claimed to be neutral, transparent and objective, it is ideology-loaded. In English economic news discourse, reporters generally use modal operators, modal adjuncts metaphors of modality, speech reporting and tense to express their own attitude and viewpoint and meanwhile influence the readers'understanding in a cover way. This once again proves the viewpoint of critical linguists—language is a kind of social practice, so it will be inevitably influenced by ideology of the people and will, on the other hand, exert influence on the formation of people's ideology.This thesis conducts a preliminary study on the analysis of modality in English economic news texts in CDA approach. The theoretical implication of the study is to provide a means of decoding the economic news language to see how it is used by powerful groups to reinforce dominant ideologies. The practical significance lies in the fact that it tries to provide readers with different perspective of analyzing language, so that they can develop critical language awareness and are able to realize the ideological point of view embedded in language.